The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is: What does a woman want?
Freud |
Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.
Kingsley Amis, ‘A bookshop Idyll’ |
Women are programmed to love completely, and men are programmed to spread it around.
Beryl Bainbridge, Daily Telegraph |
Hail Sovereign Queen of secrets, that hast power
To call the fiercest Tyrant from his rage;
And weep unto a girl; that has the might
Even with an eye-glance, to cloak Mars’s Drum
And turn th’allarm to whispers, that canst make
A Cripple flourish with his Crutch, and cure him
Before Apollo; that may’st force the King
To be his subjects’ vassal, and induce
Stale gravity to daunce. Shakespeare |
A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.
Anita Brookner |
A women who looks like a girl and thinks like a man is the best sort, the most enjoyable to be and the most pleasurable to have and to hold. Damaged Gods, Born again Cows
Julie Burchill |
It seems as though women keep growing. Eventually they can have little or nothing in common with the men they chose long ago.
Eugenie Clark, Ms. |
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
Lawrence Durrell, Justine |
When a woman behaves like a man why doesn’t she behave like a nice man?
(Dame) Edith Evans, Observer |
Being a woman is worse than being a farmer – there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done; legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturized spots, cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised. The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed…Is it any wonder girls have no confidence?
Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary |
In mixed company, women practice a sort of visual shorthand, which, later, they will laboriously and at great length decode in the company of other women.
Chazal |
There is one phase of life that I have never heard
discussed in any seminar
And that is that all women think men are funny and
all men think that weminar
Nash |
A woman is more responsive to a man’s forgetfulness than to his attentions.
Janin |
The years that a woman subtracts from her age are not lost. They are added to other women’s.
Diane De Poitiers |
Next to the wound, what women make best is the bandage.
Barbey D’aurevilly |
Women are always afraid of things, which have to be divided.
Balzac |
Women are most fascinating between the ages of thirty-five and forty, after they have won a few races and know how to pace themselves. Since few women ever pass forty, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely.
Christian Dior, Collier’s Magazine |
Some women respond to the whip, some to the kiss. Most of them likely a mixture of both, but none of them answer to the mind alone, to the intellectual demand, unless they are man dressed as woman.
Ian Fleming, The Life of Ian Fleming |
Women like to sit down with trouble as if it were knitting.
Jenny Blair, The Sheltered Life |
Why are women … so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf |
We are becoming the men we wanted to marry
Gloria Steinem, Ms. |
An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.
Booth Tarkington, ‘The Hopeful Pessimist’ |
Men are cleverer than women at reasoning, women are cleverer than men at drawing conclusions. A parliament in which the members were predominantly women would get through its legislation much faster.
Ghazal |
The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
Coleridge |
I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.
George Eliot |
In Paris, when God provides a beautiful woman, the devil at once retorts with a fool to keep her.
Barbey D’aurevily |
The wife carries the husband on her face; the husband carries the wife on his linen.
Bulgarian Proverb |
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the … power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Virginia Woolf |
It is because of men that women dislike one another.
La Bruyere |
A man has every season, while a woman has only the right to spring.
Jane Fonda Daily Mall |
Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Men are so honest, so thoroughly square; eternally noble, historically fair.
Alan Jay Lerner, ‘A Hymn to Him’ |
I ‘m furious about the women’s liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket.
Anita Loos |
[Be] Brave and deny at the outset – that pathetic claptrap war cry Woman is the equal of man for She is NOT! …. Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not – Seek within yourselves to find out what you are.
Mina Loy, Virginia M Kovidis, ‘Feminist Manifesto’ |
Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to be as mediocre as possible.
Margaret Mead Quote Magazine |
The one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the Existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man.
George Bernard Shaw, Getting Married, ‘The Right to Motherhood’ |
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no is surprised..
Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins |
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.
Charlotte Whitton, Canada Month |
Love lessens woman’s delicacy and increases man’s
Richter |
There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truth, which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.
Proust |
An absence, the decline of a dinner invitation, an unintentional coldness, can accomplish more than all the cosmetics and beautiful dresses in the world.
Proust |
What attracts us in a woman rarely binds us to her.
Collins |
Women grow attached to men through the favors they grant them; but men, through the same favors, are cured of their love.
La Bruyere |
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
Balzac |
Women are won when they begin to threaten.
Nero |
No woman ever hates a man for being in love with her; but many a woman hates a man for being a friend to her.
Pope |
Such is the rule of modesty, a woman of feeling betrays her sentiments for her lover sooner by deed than by word.
Stendhal |
A wise woman never yields by appointment.
Stendhal |
A woman with eyes only for one person, or with eyes always averted from him, creates exactly the same impression.
La Bruyere |
There is no fury like a woman searching for a new lover.
Connolly |
How many girls are there for whom great beauty has been of no use but to make them hope for a great fortune?
La Bruyere |
A wife is to thank God her husband hath faults…. A husband without faults is a dangerous observer.
Halifax |
One must not become attached to animals; they do not last long enough. Or to men: they last too long.
Anonymous |
Men seldom make passes…..
At girls who wear glasses. |
| Dorothy Parker, News Item |
